Straight Outta Compton Movie Review!

The first time I heard Eazy-E’s “Boyz-n-the-Hood” I felt like I was legitimately getting away with something. So much so that it wasn’t even a pleasurable experience – I felt that, at any second, I was about to get in some sort of “trouble.” (I put “trouble” in quotes because the kind of trouble I’d be getting into at the time, as a freshman in high school in the suburbs of Kansas City, is not the kind of trouble Eazy-E was rapping about – I just basically didn’t want my mom to yell at me.) It’s hard to describe now, but I had never heard anything like it. I remember asking my friend – who was a year older and had a driver’s license and a car and that song on a cassette tape – if we should be listening to this, in a You’re allowed to cuss in music? kind of way. You’re allowed to say THIS? Even to me, who knew nothing about anything, this seemed significant. (Soon after, my parents bought me D.J. Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince’s album, He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper.) Watching Straight Outta Compton — the new biopic on N.W.A., directed by F. Gary Gray (probably best known for directing The Italian Job) – it feels like watching The Avengers of hip hop biopics. Every character – most of them being a very famous human being who usually doesn’t go by his given birth name – gets his own dramatic introduction, accompanied by on-screen text. Look, I get that I was the perfect age when Straight Outta Compton the album came out to fully be enamored with each and every player from that era, but good grief if I didn’t get excited every time someone new was introduced. (BTW, I’m writing this at a bar with wi-fi immediately after seeing the movie. Our server asked what I was writing about. I told her and she gave me an emotional monologue about how much she cried as a 12-year-old when Eazy-E died and how she can’t wait for this movie. I suspect this movie will do well.) Do you remember in the song “Straight Outta Compton,” when Dr. Dre introduces Eazy-E, “Eazy is his name and the boy is coming…,” then, without a beat, Eazy-E dramatically yells, “Straight outta Compton!” to start his verse? The whole movie is kind of like that … dramatic introductions. If you are a person who doesn’t care about N.W.A, I can totally understand why this might be grating. (“And let me introduce you to another talented artist, his name is Iron Man, I think he’s going places.”) But I am someone who does enjoy N.W.A and I was enamored by it all. The second biggest surprise for me was just how much time was covered. We meet Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson, Jr., the son of Ice Cube who sometimes made me forget it wasn’t actually Ice Cube Sr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), DJ Yella (Neil Brown, Jr.), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and (with help from) The D.O.C. (Marlon Yates, Jr.) as they all come together to form The Avengers N.W.A. But the movie doesn’t just focus on the recording of Straight Outta Compton, it moves on (and on, and on; it’s a very long movie, clocking in at almost two and a half hours) to Dr. Dre recording The Chronic, meeting Snoop Dogg, and even Eazy-E’s death. With so much time covered, each character gets a “here’s a bad thing I did” moment, but a good amount of the more unseemly things the core members of the group did aren’t ignored, but are also not explored in a meaningful way. The biggest surprise for me was how much humor is in this movie. About half the lines O’Shea Jackson, Jr. delivers are hilarious – and intentionally so. There’s a scene early in the movie in which a record label is trying to sign N.W.A – Dr. Dre asks an executive from the label about their other clients. The executive responds that they represent the California Raisins, and what happens because of this becomes one of the funniest scenes I’ve seen in a movie this year. Paul Giamatti has a sort of weird role as the band’s manager, Jerry Heller, who’s often utilized for comedic relief but later becomes the guy everyone in the band hates for cheating them out of money. I love Giamatti, but I’m not sure this particular dynamic works, it probably should be one or the other, funny guy or villain. Since this is a true story, I’m going with the whole “cheating the band” angle. (It should be pointed out that between this, Love & Mercy, and Rock Of Ages, this is Giamatti’s third “evil music industry” character in three years. I’m just glad his character didn’t try to convince N.W.A to change their name to The Z-Boyeezz.) Now, to nail home the Straight Outta Compton/superhero movie comparison further, the movie even has its own comic book villain, Suge Knight (R. Marcus Taylor), who looms over the entire movie. (If that weren’t enough, the real Suge Knight wound up k!lling someone on the set of this very movie.) Suge Knight is the Thanos of Straight Outta Compton. Again, Straight Outta Compton is not a short movie and it has a hard time sustaining its blistering momentum from the first half, but the first half is such a crowdpleaser, the film has earned enough goodwill to sustain itself through the end of a movie that, yes, drags at times. But, regardless, if you care about these people at all, Straight Outta Compton will make you happy. It’s just so great to see all of these people on screen. And it’s great to see Eazy-E again, so full of life. I just hope my mom doesn’t find out.

http://uproxx.com/movies/... pton-review/2/

The ferocious rhymes of hip-hop icons N.W.A.’s controversial 1988 anthem “F–k tha Police” scarcely seem to have aged when they blast on to the soundtrack of “Straight Outta Compton,” echoing into a world where the abuse of black Americans at the hands of law-enforcement officials remains common headline news. But if “Compton” is undeniably of the moment, it’s also timeless in its depiction of how artists and writers transform the world around them into angry, profane, vibrant and singular personal expression. A conventional music-world biopic in outline, but intensely human and personal in its characterizations and attention to detail, director F. Gary Gray’s movie is a feast for hip-hop connoisseurs and novices alike as it charts the West Coast rap superstars’ meteoric rise, fractious in-f!ghting and discovery that the music business can be as savage as the inner-city streets. A very smart piece of counter-programming in a summer dominated by lily-white tentpole movies, Universal’s Aug. 14 opener should keep the studio clocking much dollars at the late-summer box office. When it dropped in 1988, N.W.A.’s first studio album (from which the movie takes its title) shook the hip-hop world from its solid East Coast moorings with its button-pushing, madly rhythmic depictions of thug life in South L.A. — an ur-text for the subgenre that would become known as “gangsta rap,” though N.W.A.’s members themselves preferred the term “reality rap.” Along with Public Enemy’s “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” (released the same year), “Compton” was the album that fully announced hip-hop as the rage-filled protest music of its era — a primal scream from under the boot of white authority, or what the critic Nelson George called “the full-blown sound of revolution.” The group’s charismatic 19-year-old rapper and lyricist O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (played here by his real-life son, O’Shea Jr.) said he and his bandmates were merely “street reporters,” filing dispatches from the from the front lines of a resource-starved community engaged in trench warfare with the Daryl Gates-era LAPD. Everything about N.W.A. was confrontational, starting with their name (short for “n*ggaz With Attitude”). Gray’s panoramic film (running a densely packed two-and-a-half-hours) is the story of N.W.A., yes, but also of the city in those same years — a long-simmering discontent that finally erupted into the 1992 riots. But first we begin in 1986 with the DNA of N.W.A. — the friendship between Cube and aspiring DJ Andre “Dr. Dre” Young (Corey Hawkins), and their courtship of a neighborhood drug dealer, Eric “Eazy-E” Wright (Jason Mitchell), to funnel some of his illicit funds into a record label (appropriately dubbed Ruthless) for burgeoning West Coast hip-hop acts. And it’s Wright (brilliantly played by Mitchell, the biggest revelation among the young actors) who emerges as “Compton’s” most compellingly complex character, a hip-hop Napoleon whose small stature and high-pitched voice mask a shrewd business acumen. Even when Gray (who made his feature debut directing the real Ice Cube in the stoner-slacker classic “Friday”) puts “Compton” through the somewhat familiar biopic paces, he brings a richness of observation to the table that transcends cliche. (The exhaustively researched screenplay is credited to Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, from a story by S. Leigh Savidge, Alan Wenkus and Berloff.) The live performance and recording scenes have the same loose, semi-improvised feel of the ones in the recent Beach Boys drama “Love & Mercy,” especially when Eazy steps up to a mic for the very first time to lay down his hit single “Boyz-n-the-Hood,” and Cube performs an early version of “Gangsta Gangsta” at a nightclub where slow-jam R&B is the house style. These early brushes with fame bring the N.W.A. boys into the orbit of Jerry Heller (Paul Giamatti, sporting a swooping gray toupee), a veteran rock manager who pledges to lead his new clients into the lap of white music-biz respectability. But while Heller may be the prototypical wolf in Jewish cowboy couture, “Straight Outta Compton” is loath to pass rash judgments on its characters, whose motivations Gray and the writers strive to understand even when their actions verge on the monstrous. (The only unqualified monster here is the bodyguard-turned-mogul Marion “Suge” Knight, played with terrifying force of presence by R. Marcos Taylor.) “Compton” doesn’t make the N.W.A. members themselves into paragons of virtue, even as it suggests that much of their swagger and braggadocio were more performance than reality — as well as necessary defense mechanisms on streets where real gangbangers posed a serious threat and where the police made little distinction between one type of young black man and another. Gray plunges us into that pressure-cooker atmosphere repeatedly, including one scene — depicted here as the inspiration for “F–k tha Police” — that can’t help but send a chill through the theater in light of the recent events in Ferguson and other black communities: While taking a break from the “Compton” recording sessions, the rappers are descended on by a swarm of Torrance cops who humiliatingly shake them down while disparaging the very existence of hip-hop. Gray casts a wider net in the film’s second half, as friction among the three N.W.A. principals (over money, natch) sends them spinning off into their own orbits, Cube with movie projects and a platinum solo career, Dre as a prolific producer who — in and out of tumultuous partnership with Knight — helps to foster a new generation of hip-hop talent (including Snoop Dogg, Tupac and Eminem). The former friends turn rivals, trading barbed insults on their albums and occasional fisticuffs in public. Then L.A. burns, and out of the ashes, a relaxing of tensions — and hope of an N.W.A. reunion — begins to take hold. But even as the film broadens its scope, Gray’s direction remains sharp and vibrant, giving us a “Rashomon”-style sense of how post-N.W.A. life looked from each character’s perspective, and reaching unexpected depths of emotional power as Wright starts to succumb to the AIDS-related complications that would cut his life short, at age 31, in 1995. The movie has been made in high but never overindulgent style, with Matthew Libatique’s richly textured widescreen camerawork deliberately avoiding shopworn images of South Central life while evoking a vivid sense of place, and the editing of Billy Fox and Michael Tronick keeping the complex narrative moving smoothly from beat to beat. The encyclopedic soundtrack — ranging across the N.W.A. catalog, its members solo ventures, their old-school R&B influences, and the top-40 pop hip-hop would displace as the dominant sound of the era — has been a.ssembled with similarly meticulous care.